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A lot of changes in the realm of privacy-related laws across many countries have redefined the significance of Virtual Private Networks (VPN). The growing incidence and severity of cyber-attacks make VPNs critical and expensive-to-ignore. A solid IT strategy powered by VPN services automation helps to safeguard any data transmitted across the network, which may, otherwise, be at a huge risk if it simply used the underlying public network infrastructure. Let us revisit some of the key benefits offered by VPN even today and also see how L2 & L3 VPN services complexity can be sorted out.
Security – One of the main reasons organizations adopt VPN! Data breaches not only lead to compensation burdens and regulatory fines but can wreak lasting reputational damage
Mobility –VPN helps to support mobility and remote office/branch office connectivity. A rise in BYOD, boost to productivity by ensuring that staff is not tethered to traditional office working times and locations – these outcomes transpire with a good VPN in place
Collaboration – Companies that employ VPN can benefit from enhanced collaboration without worrying about the security of their critical data
Cost – VPN can prove much more affordable than a private physical network. Rather than having to lease long-distance network connections to achieve a secure transfer of data, businesses can use the existing public network to facilitate their VPNs
It’s time to revisit VPN, but this time armed with the toolkit of automation, provisioning, and agility.
But is getting there all that easy?
What struggles accompany VPN before you can make it the fast, smooth, and friendly highway your workloads can enjoy?
- Complexity – It can be complicated to set up and configure VPNs
- You have to deal with the difficulties of handling multi-vendor network knots and multi-skilled staff
- Managing multiple flavors (Each flavor with multiple possibilities) – L2 & L3 VPN services can be a daunting task
- Configurations can get arduous and may need some heavy-lifting
- Pre & Post validations can take away a lot of time and attention
Enters ATOM
What if you could wipe away the complexity, the surprises, and the weight of VPN Provisioning?
In a normal scenario, the service provider side of configuration, primarily on PE routers, is handled by the service provider itself. The enterprise side of configuration, which is primarily on CE routers, is undertaken by the enterprise IT team. This provisioning exercise involves some back-and-forth dance of interactions and documentation-exchange. A point where the role of skilled resources on both the enterprise and provider side becomes heightened! The scenario also makes room for errors to slip in and for delays in time-to-market to slip out of control. Plus, each enterprise has different requirements, staff expertise levels, sizes, and traffic volumes.
Precisely why bringing in ATOM can mitigate these challenges and simultaneously accentuate enterprise agility.
Provision L2 VPN services with ease by using ATOM
If you are looking to have better control of networks with L2 VPN, this is how ATOM can help you.
- ATOM provides the flexibility of provisioning both enterprise and service provider side of L2 VPN through a single form. With a flexible service-modeling framework based on YANG, the service provider’s NetOps team can deliver customer VPN requests on-demand
- ATOM also supports automation and rapid configuration of L2 VPN models
- ATOM equips the teams strongly on point-to-point areas such as E-LINE or point-to-multi-point such as E-LAN, L2 VPNs defined by MEF
- With ATOM, you can manage an end-to-end service lifecycle and bring in the abstraction layer, which masks the network-level complexity. Multi-vendor support in ATOM ensures that NetOps teams do not need to learn multiple vendor CLIs which can be complex and overwhelming
- ATOM brings in inimitable network strengths with service attributes of performance, bandwidth, speed, mode, and an enviable class-of-service
- With ATOM you can easily define ACLs, routing policies, pseudo-wire templates, and QoS-services
- ATOM helps you to provision the discovery (how circuits are established between PE routers) type including manual discovery, BGP-auto-discovery, l2vpn discovery, LDP discovery and mixed discovery
- The signaling type could be chosen from the drop-down feature and could be of any stripe – BGP-signaling, l2vpn signaling, mixed signaling, ldp signaling, static configuration
What if you want to provision L3 VPN services with ATOM?
Built on a sturdy combination of IP and MPLS networking, L3 VPN services are generally used to send data on back-end VPN infrastructures, such as VPN connections between data centers or back offices. L3 VPN services – a strong answer that can solve a lot of scalability issues that conventional VPNs brings in. The complexity, however, moves onto the service provider due to the routing aspects. The service provider also needs to handle many of these customer VPNs through a common infrastructure. This slaps additional complexity on the system in terms of segregating the traffic, which, in turn, translates into complex configurations.
- With ATOM’s brown-field discovery, the service provider’s infrastructure can get easily and completely on-boarded into ATOM. ATOM performs inventory management including config retrieval and building corresponding device models
- With ATOM’s extraordinary provisioning capabilities, it is simple to configure VPN services on the PE routers in the service provider infrastructure
- ATOM can enable service providers to cater to multiple customers by provisioning VPN routing and VRFs. These flexible service models allow configuration of the corresponding route-targets along with the route-distinguishing indicators for a particular customer
- ATOM allows the automation of routing policies for BGP routing, RIP routing, OSPF routing, static routing, etc.
- ATOM supports provisioning of multiple VPN services topologies such as any-to-any, Hub-and-Spoke (where Hubs can exchange traffic), and Hub-and-Spoke disjoint
- ATOM can provision Bandwidth, QoS, QoS classifications
- Connection to IPAM to configure the customer-facing interfaces is effortless and swift with ATOM
- ATOM can also automate VPN for cloud access and also external server/resource access via extranet VPN
That's not all
ATOM brings in a new burst of strength and some stark advantages that accelerate an enterprise to new heights
- ATOM supports more than 45+ different vendors and 150+ different platforms helping service providers, and enterprises reap the benefits of ATOM’s abstraction capability
- ATOM complies to RFC 8466 and RFC 8299 for L2 and L3 VPN YANG model definition respectively
- The model-driven approach allows easy creation, updates, and deletion of services
- ATOM supports atomic transactions, ensuring the service is either provisioned completely or not provisioned at all. It, hence, leaves no loose-ends – No stray configurations in any of the devices involved
- ATOM enables secure and segregated access to the service provider’s customers with its sharp RBAC and Multi-tenancy features. Service Providers can manage multiple customer information parts with pragmatic and hassle-free isolation
- ATOM’s micro-services based and horizontally-scalable architecture helps service providers to scale their customer base at ease
A peek into some extra advantages that ATOM delivers
- Integrate ATOM’s service models into ATOM’s low-code automation
- Execute pre-checks before provisioning the L2 & L3 VPN services
- Trigger ATOM’s VPN service models as parts of workflow automation to automate L2 and L3 VPN services
- Execute post-checks after provisioning the VPN service to make sure the tunnels are up
- Ensure configuration consistency with ATOM’s service compliance. ATOM’s service compliance ensures a thorough configuration on both enterprise and service provider sides of the VPN. Any out-of-band change in the service is detected immediately, and ATOM performs auto-reconciliation to ensure compliance &automated service assurance.
Who's Leveraging ATOM ?
A clean-energy company approached Anuta Networks outlining the pain points around VPN services. The enterprise experienced slow and manual provisioning of VPN & internet services. With a large and complex network of more than 2000 devices served by multiple vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, and Huawei, the enterprise was struggling to manage the network, which also required mission-critical availability. Being an energy company, it was also heavily governed by regulatory policies from authorities such as NERC for maintaining control and consistency across the multi-vendor infrastructure.
Based on the deep and visceral analysis, Anuta Networks suggested standardization of VPN service configurations. With ATOM’s flexible service-modeling capability, the energy company automated its L2 VPN (E-LINE & ELAN) and L3 VPN services with unprecedented ease and staggeringly-fast deployments. Irrespective of its network endpoints, the company could easily provision services without any hassles such as human errors.
Bundled with ATOM’s workflow automation by adding relevant post-checks, the NetOps teams in the energy company could ascertain the status of the VPN tunnels. This equipped them with an immediate indication of the status of the services, that too, in an automated manner.
To comply with the regulations, the company used ATOM’s compliance management, where it could ensure both VPN service consistency along with specific regulatory requirements on Day-0 and other Day-N configurations. ATOM was able to detect any changes to the configurations and immediately take remediation actions such as sending a notification to the energy company’s self-service portal. Thanks to ATOM’s open framework, the NetOps teams could drive all their operations from their homegrown self-service portal without having to learn ATOM’s user interface.
To add to that, the horizontally-scalable micro-services architecture of ATOM helped the enterprise scale the sprawling breadth of its large and complex networks.
This could be you!
Enjoying a fast, smooth, intelligent, and intuitive network that does not have to be unwieldy, clunky, knotty, or costly – that’s possible!
Talk to us and experience the power of ATOM. Unleash the potential of your network, the ATOM way!
Learn more about how one of the leading IT services management company, Technica, evaluated Anuta Networks ATOM and its VPN services provisioning capability.
